I’ve collected some great stories from customers telling me how WizeHive helps them collaborate and manage their workflow.  Read the Success Stories – they may give you ideas about how online collaboration and project management can help you become more efficient and more productive.

The Haas Foundation has staff and volunteers all over the world. Using 31 workspaces, the executive director can facilitate collaboration amongst departments and all hands, and keep her hand on the pulse of all activities going on across the board.  Zig Marketing collaborates internally with different departments creating various campaigns and then communicates with their clients via dedicated, secure workspaces. The president of Tech9, an IT consulting firm, monitors his customers using dedicated workspaces and then tracks internal tickets with another workspace. At a glance, he can see everything going on both internally and with his clients. A copywriter collaborates with his graphic designer in one workspace and communicates with his own personal clients in another, while he’s working on launching a collaborative website for Jazz lovers in yet another. The Engineering and Manufacturing team at Novitá Technologies was able to shorten the production cycle for automotive original equipment from a year to an impressive ten days, thanks to WizeHive, which  allowed them to put together a fully comprehensive plan and execute it without losing a detail.

TechCrunch50 and DreamIt Ventures are using WizeHive in another way. Using the Applicant Manager version of WizeHive, they streamlined and organized their entire application process from acceptance to collaborative ranking to scheduling candidate interviews, saving a huge amount of time in reviewing and organizing their applications.

I hope this gives you some ideas for your projects and groups… please continue reaching out (fernATwizehive dot com) and letting me know how WizeHive helps you, or maybe how we CAN help you if you haven’t tried it out for yourself yet.

WizeHive Learning Center

I’m excited to announce the launch of our new Learning Center, where you can watch eight Demonstration Videos to find out more about how to use WizeHive’s powerful project management and collaboration tools. Yes, these videos have all been available before, but now they are more easily accessed and shelved together for a comprehensive tutorial of WizeHive’s capabilities. Keep coming back for more updates and enhancements as they become available.

The Overview is the best place to start, whether you are new to WizeHive or a well-seasoned beta-tester who has been with us since the beginning (and thanks, if you are!) Learn how WizeHive allows you to easily share notes, ideas, messages, files, and to-do lists with team members, partners and clients you’ve invited to your own secure, private workspaces. You’ll see how information can be entered directly into your WizeHive workspace or via email, Twitter, or mobile devices. You’ll also see how your data can be viewed for each project individually or collectively on the ALL tab for a comprehensive look at all of your workspaces.

Wondering how to post notes? Check out the Recent Activity video to learn how, and see how this feature keeps you abreast of all activity in your workspaces, including newly created tasks, uploaded files, and added links. Did you know you can drag and drop your tasks on your task list to help you prioritize and manage your assignments? Or that you can integrate your WizeHive calendar with your favorite iCal-compatible calendaring system? Managing and sharing your files is paramount. Learn how to email files directly to your workspace and manage multiple versions of the same document. And many people don’t realize it, but now you can use your Twitter account to interact directly with WizeHive. Learn how to set up your workspaces to receive notes and tasks sent directly through Twitter. If you want quick desktop access to your WizeHive database, and do not want to load up your browser, you can get much of the same functionality using our free desktop client for PCs, Macs, Linux and other operating systems.

We hope these Demos help you become better acquainted with WizeHive’s features so you can increase productivity and  streamline project management. Go check out the Learning Center… good luck!

Our recent activity screen works as a “feed,” designed to work like your own private twitter.   Included in this feed are notes that are entered into the system manually, replies to the notes, and system generated messages that occur when new tasks are added, task statuses are changed, files are uploaded, etc.

Sometimes (or most of the time) it would be nice to see just the notes, but be able to see other things from time to time.

We have added a drop down filter box onto the activity screen to do just that.  Simply pick “notes,” “notes and replies,” or “all activity” from this list to change your settings.

Just a few weeks ago we added Page Groups to WizeHive.  You can use Page Groups as categories to group pages together.    This is one of my favorite new features.     Anyway, with the release last night you can now modify the order in which page groups appear.

Ultimately we may create a drag and drop way to do this but for now it is easy to change the order of page groups as follows.   When you create a page group (from manage workspace -> pages) you will now see a new field called “Order.”   If the order is blank or if two groups have the same order, they will be sorted alphabetically.  But if you want one page group before another, simply give it a lower number.

3D Task Management is a cool tool we created to mimic what I’ve been doing manually for many years when managing complex projects.   It allows you to easily create a grid-like layout of your tasks with the ability to change rows and columns to see the data as you like.

3D Task Management is one of our optional “WizeApps” that appear as a tab in a given workspace.

To enable 3D Task Management for a given workspace, go into “Manage” workspace and then click on “Enable” alongside the 3D Task area as follows:

To see a video of 3D Tasks in action click here.

We are pleased to share twitter integration with the WizeHive family!

You are now able to send tasks and notes to WizeHive directly from Twitter and are able to retrieve tasks also. Here is our video

WizeHive Twitter from mike on Vimeo.

We are pleased to share a number of new features for you with our May release:

• Join Workspace: I love this one! Instead of having to invite people you may now provide someone with a password into a particular workspace and they can join the space right form within WizeHive. To turn this permission on for a given workspace you need to be an administrator and then go into “manage” Workspace. From there, under the “Info” tab you will see the ability to enable the password. This password is generated for you by the system.  Once you have it you can tell others to select “Join Workspace” from the top menu, then type in your Workspace name and password.

• Page Groups: Another new favorite. I had multiple situations where I had a long list of pages within one workspace and wanted to organize or group them. Enter Page Groups. To enable and use page groups you must be an administrator for a given workspace. From the pages box in the dashboard, click on “Manage.” You will then see a new option in the upper left corner called “New Page Group.” Once you enable a group you can then move existing pages into the group from this same window. You can also manage page names and groups by clicking on the small gray down arrow next to the name of the page in the page box within your dashboard.   Here are some examples of how page groups can be used:

• 3D Tasks: We are going to keep this in private beta a bit longer but if you are interested let us know and we can share it with you. This feature allows you to create a 3d view of your tasks similar to how you would create a pivot table in Excel. We want to test this a bit more.

You may also note that our web site has gotten a face lift! Please let us know if you see anything that needs to be fixed.

• Invite Process: We have added an option during the invite process where you can choose to send your own email to invite someone to share the workspace rather than have WizeHive send the email. You do this by copying the link supplied into your own email and then adding your own text/invitation.

• Note/Memo Field: We have added a note/memo field to the customized data tab.

• File Uploads: You can now specify a workspace and page when uploading a file from the file upload screen.

• Daily Digest: You can now get a daily digest of all workspace activities. You can do this in lieu of or in addition to getting individual emails.

We are very excited to share with you our latest release.   We need to create some videos to show this off (shortly) but it is a great product.   Here are some of the highlights of our new task manager:

• Tasks can now be grouped by person, status or other fields.

• You can now drag tasks to set priority. To drag move to the left side where the star type symbol is and just drag.

• You can also drag tasks between groups to reassign them.

• You can select a color code so that when tasks are grouped by one criteria there color can reflect a different criteria.   For instance, you can group by person yet show colors based on priority.

There are many other new aspects to our task manager and we hope you enjoy using it!

If you want to restore the old task manager (for some reason) you can go to “Manage Workspace” then “WizeApps” and then “enable” Tasks V1 and you will have that tab in your workspace (only an administrator can change a workspace).

We are happy to share with you the newest release of WizeHive:

• DashBoard Position: The “dashboard”, the area where we display the workspace logo and the page box can now be set by the user to be either on the right-hand side (where it is now) or on the left. To change the position go into “Manage Account” and click on the new “Display” option.

• Page Selection Box: To assist in page navigation there will be an additional option for navigating pages.  Currently the page selection box (which appears on the right-hand side) shows the last pages selected. You can now optionally choose to display a scrolling box which lists the pages alphabetically and which displays up to about 20 at a time. To change the position go into “Manage Account” and click on the new “Display” option.

• Invite Process: The invite process has been upgraded to allow you to send your own invitation in addition to our system generated invitation.

• Daily Digest: In addition to or instead of individual emails you may opt to receive a daily digest, which lists all of your open tasks plus daily notes from your current workspaces. To change this go to “Manage Accounts” and click on “Alerts.” You will then see an option for Daily Digest.

• Email Links: Emails generated for new activities will include a link that takes you directly to the activity thread posting when clicked.